Started a bit earlier, with the election of Ronald Reagan in 1981. IMNVHO
And Margaret Thatcher being mean in the UK.
Not up for reading and commenting right now, but the system has been that the Republicans believe in ‘trickle down economics’ – so let’s make more, richer billionaires – the meanest system ever invented. Never mind that the system has been thoroughly discredited almost as long.
The 1st time Teflon Ron Reagan ran for governor of California, he lied to the state’s public-school teachers. He did it to get our vote. I was a registered republican then and changed my registration to independent and never voted for a Republican again. When Traitor Trump came along, I changed my registration and became a Democrat so I could vote in that party’s primaries. It is an understatement, when I say I learned to despise and distrust Reagan. But Reagan wasn’t a traitor.
Not personally very smart, and badly advised on top of it. But mean, like all of them.
In our society, it is OFTEN not possible to work your way out of poverty against privilege. They just made it harder. A permanent underclass is a source of cheap labor.
The part I hate the most is the hypocrisy – many of those greedy entrepreneurs claimed to be Christians and donated large sums of money to THEIR favorite causes, before THEY died. So they wouldn’t be remembered as the scum they were.
When I was born, my family still lived in poverty. My brother never got out. My sister married he way out. She married a truck driver who drove 18 wheelers coast to coast. While I was still a toddler, my godfather helped get my dad a union job where he worked in construction. My sister’s husband belonged to the teamsters union. My older brother never had an opportunity to land a union job and was stuck in poverty until the day he died at 64, from working hard labor jobs for poverty wages, drinking too much booze and smoking too much pot and tobacco. Near the end he was a broken angry man with horrible health.
The working-class union jobs made the difference. My sister, who is now 93, reminded me recently that I never experienced the poverty she did while growing up, but I told her I remembered what it was like as our parents worked their way out of poverty and then lost everything they had after dad lost his union job after a long-extended strike. We lost the house and almost ended up homeless. My sister was long gone by then and didn’t suffer the same fate. She also may not know that even happened.
Then my dad got work again through the union during the era Southern California was building its freeways and storm drainage system, and our parents bought a smaller house in a poorer neighborhood than the one they lost and eventually paid it off. I was about 7 years old by then.
The tragedy is that they didn’t have to lose the larger more expensive house. A house they build themselves on land they paid cash for, doing most of the work with help from friends and family so it was paid off from the start, but my mother panicked (she had cancer and couldn’t work and dad was unemployed and off drinking away his guilt and depression) when she couldn’t pay the property tax and called a local real estate agent she probably found in the Yellow Pages, who turned out to be a ruthless cutthroat capitalist, who bought the house for cash on the spot. Later, she’d discover that agent was a crook and bought the house for less than half what it was worth. And moved in making it his own home. If she’d known, she could have taken out a loan on the equality in the house and held on to it. But that real estate agent didn’t bother to tell her that.
Makes you SO angry.
Thank you for 1981. I used 1983 because that’s the year the fascists supporting Reagan (and now Traitor Trump) released the manipulating, lying, misleading A Nation at Risk report, blaming that lie on our public schools and the fascists decaled war against public school teachers and their labor unions. I started teaching as a public-school teacher in 1975. After 1983, teaching became toxic, and only grew worse as the fascists escalated their war to destroy the teaching profession and OUR public schools and it’s still going on. In some Red States, teaching has become a dystopian never-ending nightmare.
Reagan did what they told him to do. He was just the figurehead on the cake. He had no real ideas of his own, any more than Bush 2nd did. He PLAYED a president rather than being one. Left a huge public debt. Loved photo ops like 45. Liked the nice travel and perks. No substance. He was a B-movie actor, for heaven’s sake!
Kind of like those stories in which a doppleganger (body double) replaces the real king/prince/emperor and has to behave like him.
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